The Implementation Of The TOPS System At British Railways
There were incidents of oversupply and underutilization of train wagons which lead to the implementation of the TOPS system. There has been also economic crisis faced by the British freight which resulted due to the competition from road haulage. As a result of manual conversation, much of the information had been inaccurate as a result of manipulation of information by the supervisors. The senior operations management were also unaware of what was going on and huge number of locomotives were underutilized. To control this problem, the TOPS system offered a potential solution.
The TOPS was completely new in the BR region where people did not know how to handle them. People from other department for implementing the TOPS systems and they did not know how to manage the new technology. Therefore, in this case the Task Force were advantageous to them who assumed complete control on the entire project. The disadvantage was that the team of the task force should be having enough enthusiasm for achieving the task. If the people were not highly enthusiastic for the project they would have been fired from the project.
The degree of change which is needed by the organizations involves cultural transformation. The chaining culture is also concerned with various leadership as well as power issues (Kaufman 2017). Therefore, it can be said that corporate culture is an important part for understanding change. There is always a need for a greater understanding of the cultural change and context within the organizations.
It can be said that sometimes changes in the organizations are good since implementing TOPS had been successful and helped in saving many jobs (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2015). The people in the Task Force had to work with high enthusiasm and were backed by high level support from the management where they did not get any opportunity for resisting change.
References
Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S., 2015. Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress. Routledge.
Kaufman, H., 2017. The limits of organizational change. Routledge.